SEARCHER'S VOICESkip This Adby Barbara Quint
Editor, Searcher
Magazine Mark Twain once had an idea for a publication called The
Back Number, but it never got off the ground.
He couldn’t convince any publisher that the
idea would work. Twain’s notion was that one
could take news stories published months or years
before and re-publish them. He believed that people
loved news or gossip because of the style of writing
involved — that fresh, contemporaneous, “Psst!
Have you heard?” approach, the “hot off
the press” style in fact — and Twain
thought readers would still find news appealing even
if it weren’t new, if it were actually “cold
off the press.” Basically, Twain deplored the
way experts and historians could convert lively news
into deadly dull prose.

One sympathizes. On the other hand, defining news-worthiness
by its newness alone, or in fact by its writing style,
ignores some larger issues. Is the story true? Is the
story complete? Is the story relevant to the reader’s
interests and needs? Sometimes that takes a little
longer to determine. And in this age of information
overload, sometimes prudent readers should save their
eyeballs not for the latest information, but for the
best information.

(And here comes the commercial.)

For example, my colleague, Paula Hane, and I — assisted
by some wonderful writers — have been doing weekly
NewsBreaks on the http://www.infotoday.com/newsbreaks Web site for just under 8 years now. Personally, I
have found the experience educational, liberating,
and comforting: educational because it has taught me
the practical essentials of real journalism; liberating
because it has opened up new areas of interests, new
contacts, new relationships; and comforting because
I have the security of a real learning experience to
relieve my mind of the worry that the life of an editor
pushes one further and further from the realities experienced
by one’s readers.

But now I worry that not enough people read our NewsBreaks.
And they’re good. Honest. They really are.

The problem is that we derive our leads from many
of the same sources that bloggers or daily news sources
in the field use. We get press releases and inside
tips from vendors, the same sort of news people may
see posted on listservs or on blogs or in general news
sources, such as wires and newspapers. However, out
of all the news story opportunities that flow by, we
try to pick out the ones that will have the most impact
on our readers, both buyers and sellers of digital
information, and that seem to need more research.
We then check different sources: the vendors and their
partners, competitor input, consumer reactions. We
interview key players, search out more details, and
ask the hard questions about strategic policies, long-term
commitment, and quality of service.

I worry that people see an announcement in a blog
or on a list or in an RSS feed and eyeball it casually.
Then, if they go to our NewsBreak Web site or get an
announcement through the alert service e-zine Info
Today releases [http://www.infotoday.com/newslink/],
they ignore it, thinking they have already read the
story. But I can tell you, if we decide to give a story
NewsBreak coverage, there has got to be enough meat
on the bone to deserve that effort. Something there
needs more chewing or is proving hard to swallow.

I’ll give you one example. Yahoo! Search released
a new service called Yahoo! Search Subscriptions that
allows people to check off publications or aggregator
services to which they subscribe. Then Yahoo! will
search the subscriber service data and retrieve it
along with a Web search (or all by itself, if the user
prefers). This way a searcher can check fee or registered-users-only
services along with the open Web and do so in one sweep
that combines output from multiple services in one
seamless Yahoo! Search delivery. From these results,
displayed prominently on the first page of results,
the user can then click through to articles in the
controlled access services.

Sound great? It should. The very month Yahoo! Search
announced the service, my Up Front with bq column in Information
Today newsmagazine, entitled “The Invisible
Vendor,” begged vendors to let Web search engines
into their content, if only to ensure that the Web
users of the world even knew it existed. I even recommended
Yahoo! Search as a hungrier partner with whom to deal
(“Number Two and trying harder”).

Conclusion? In some cases, for example, specific publications
delivered by direct deals with individual publishers,
it should work well. But the contributions from aggregators
such as Factiva, LexisNexis, and even Thomson Gale
turned out to be so meager and/or unrepresentative
and/or limited access, that it could cause more trouble
than good. As the second NewsBreak concluded:

While the great strength of database aggregators stems
from the breadth of their coverage (which typically
includes many thousands of journals) and the depth
of their archives (which span decades), the amount
of content scheduled for delivery through Yahoo! Search
Subscriptions is so miniscule as to seem to serve no
one’s purpose. With such restricted coverage,
Yahoo! could hardly expect to succeed in wooing established
subscribers to these database services to switch to
Yahoo! Search as their primary access route. Nor can
one see how vendors expect to woo Yahoo!’s hundreds
of millions of users to their sign-up subscription
pages with only such limited, and sometimes even atypical,
content to lure them. Until the content is more complete
and more representative of the vendors’ true
offerings, it would even seem unwise for users to rely
on Yahoo! Search Subscriptions as a substitute for
direct access or even a cross-check on what exists
on “fee” services.

I’m still high on the idea behind the program
however. My final lines were:

However, it’s early yet, and we can only hope
all parties will be flexible and adapt to open up new
opportunities. Yahoo! has clearly created an attractive
framework for content providers that’s tied to
fee-based business models to reach the broader open
Web audience.

But a larger question concerns me. How many information
professionals will know enough to warn users not to
follow the Yahoo! Search Subscriptions path in the
case of aggregator services, but to go ahead and try
it for specific publications? How many people will
have read not the first coverage of the program, but — IMHO — the
best? And how often does this happen in other fields,
in other areas of interest? How often does someone
use a blog to get the first report or even to get the
first insider reaction to a report, but one that is
minus the benefit of solid reporting and responsible
editing?

Hmm. Perhaps we should start a blog — or even
an array of blogs — devoted entirely to evaluating
the coverage of news stories in every field through
application of a grading scheme that will identify
the best coverage by standards beyond currency. Hmm.